• Overview of the Docudrama: "American Experience: The Abolitionists" is a three-part docudrama produced by Sharon Grimberg, which debuted in January 2013. It features key figures in the 19th-century abolitionist movement, such as William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, and Fredrick Douglass, and is narrated by Oliver Platt.

• Historical Context: The docudrama highlights the complex social, political, and religious history of the abolitionist movement, supported by works from historians like Paul J. Polgar and James Brewer Stewart. These works provide a holistic view of the movement's evolution and its impact on American society.

• Educational Impact: The series is accompanied by a website offering classroom materials, enhancing its educational value. It serves as a trusted source for public and U.S. national history classes, promoting a broader understanding of the abolitionist movement.

Introduction

American Experience: The Abolitionists is a Public Broadcasting Station, three-part docudrama produced by Sharon Grimberg that debuted in January of 2013 and portrays some of the key figures in the 19th century abolitionist movement including William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, and Fredrick Douglass.  Narrated by Oliver Platt, the docudrama is a highly effective instrument in delivering public history to laypersons, highlighting periodic but stylized dialogue, costume and set direction, and selected primary source readings, and acting as a lodestone for more fulsome and holistic historiographies and cultural studies that influence professional history today.  The historical docudrama contributes directly to the understanding of antebellum U.S. history, providing a compelling story of the primary figures including U.S. President Abraham Lincoln that carried the abolitionists message, and contributed to a broader narrative that incorporates U.S. religious history, political history, cultural studies, and economic history of the late-18th and 19th centuries to discern a fuller and more accurate accounting of the motives and methods of abolitionists.

Paul J. Polgar in a journal entry titled “’To Raise Them to an Equal Participation’: Early National Abolitionism, Gradual Emancipation, and the Promise of African American Citizenship” describes a rich and early history of rugged individualism and evangelical religious activism of the late 18th century that helped propel immediatist abolitionists to the forefront of American politics in the middle of the 19th. Moving forward in time, James Brewer Stewart, in his monograph Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, describes an 1820-30’s America consumed by a market revolution and “cosmopolitan forces” giving rise to an abolitionist movement that demanded the immediate abolition of slavery.  Complimenting The Abolitionists, these two works are examples outside of popular U.S. history that represent a ‘New’ New History drawing from their contributions to a holistic view of the history of the abolition movement and its reverberating impacts in American society today.

Argument

American Experience: The Abolitionists features Nat Turner’s rebellion, William Garrison’s rise to the forefront of the white abolitionist movement, Grimké’s wealthy upbringing and later activism, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who broke with her father and joined with the modern immediatism abolitionists, and Fredrick Douglass in their own words, and in reenactment through stagecraft.  Coupled is a website developed to provide classroom instructors with companion materials, enhancing the visual experience with resources, more in-depth study, and archives that including expanded interviews.  As an offering for public and U.S. national history classes and the viewing public, American Experience has been a solid, trusted source since its inception in 1988.  Interwoven with this narrative about key people, events, and places in American Experience is a complex social, political, and religious history, as demonstrated by historians Polgar and Stewart.  Polgar’s exposition describes the evolution of the abolitionist movement, from its roots in the 1780’s Revolution era that began as an effort to gradually introduce black citizens to freedom through individual “industry, sobriety, and economy” and to assist them in “gradually emerging from their degraded condition.” The reasons for advocating such a slow and gradual transformation were driven by challenges at the socio-political level, and early abolitionists responded “with public persuasion, black education and civic integration, and the joint evolution of an abolitionist ideology” amongst all people in America. 

Likewise, Stewart’s work compliments American Experience by highlighting the lesser-known army of white abolitionists of the mid-19th century, including the stories of the deeds and civic actions of evangelicals. Coinciding with tent revivalism and celebrating faith-based morality, a new political activism emerged centered on “radical reformers of all varieties, not just abolitionists, [and that] traced [this] activism to the revivals of the 1820s.” From this activism, northern American abolitionists gathered strength and the favor of popular opinion, culminating in the American Civil War. Stewart’s text rounds out a more holistic historiography of abolition and the nascent mid-19th century events that helped foment this brutal and costly war.

Conclusion

With the advent of technology and the connected world of modern times, enormous amounts of rare or undiscovered history are available for students and laypersons to layer their knowledge with the histories and cultural studies that highlight and reflect a holistic understanding of peoples, places, and events.  With an eye to stylized and easy to digest reenactments like American Experience, the social sciences are positioned to illuminate on previous ‘founders chic’ histories by leading with interdisciplinary historiography that is coincidental to public history. Accurate historiographies dealing with the antebellum U.S. benefit from input by cultural studies by giving voice to contemporary peoples through the application of its many subdisciplines and informs historians for the purposes of equity and tolerance.  The need for equity and tolerance is as important today as ever before, inviting us to seek a broader history, such as those evidenced by Stewart and Polgar, to help increase public understanding and effective dialogue today.